One of the horror genre's "most widely read critics" (Rue Morgue # 68), "an accomplished film journalist" (Comic Buyer's Guide #1535), and the award-winning author of Horror Films of the 1980s (2007), The Rock and Roll Film Encyclopedia (2007) and Horror Films of the 1970s (2002), John Kenneth Muir, presents his blog on film, television and nostalgia, named one of the Top 100 Film Studies Blog on the Net.

Monday, October 31, 2016

Halloween 2016: Phantasm II (1988)

Don
Coscarelli’s Phantasm (1979) is a brilliantly-crafted horror movie, and a
classic of the genre too, in no small part because it appears to operate on
multiple levels of meaning and symbolism.

For
example, taken literally, the film is about a horrible ghoul (The Tall Man), and
his agenda to strip-mine Earth’s dead.

On
a far more complex level, Phantasm concerns the industry of death itself, from hearses
and coffins to graves and mausoleums. Death, we see, is an impersonal,
industrial process -- a factory, in some sense -- and the Tall Man is its
(cinematic) overseer.

Yet
as I’ve written before Phantasm also serves as a sensitive examination
of one boy’s reckoning with death as an inescapable fact of life.

Our
protagonist, young Michael (Michael Baldwin) dreams of combating the Tall Man
(Angus Scrimm), because he is a boogeyman or personality who can be defeated. Death itself -- the unstoppable, face-less force
that took away his brother Jody (Bill Thornbury) -- cannot be destroyed.

So
adolescent Michael conjures a “phantasm” -- a dream -- that is palatable to him
in a time of grief and mourning.

In
that dream, mortality can be overcome; death can be defeated. The Tall Man can
be buried forever. The film, featuring
moments of innocent, almost child-like wonder (witness the giant fly, born from
the Tall Man’s blood..), can thus be explained as a boy’s childhood fantasy of
beating death once and for all. A
fantasy that, in the denouement, he sees is but mere delusion.

Death
always wins.

The
sequel, 1988’s Phantasm II, is a very different film, and overall a far more
conventional one. By and large, the
metaphor behind the first film -- which involves both man’s desire and
inability to defeat death -- is left by the wayside, and the follow-up focuses
instead on action, weaponry, and loads of stylish excess.

These
predilections make Phantasm II a perfect horror film of the 1980s, an era when
escalation was the name of the game, and action replaced, to a large extent,
atmosphere.

Here,
the action scenes are deliberately stylish and over-the-top, in the mode of Sam
Raimi’s Evil Dead franchise, and Raimi himself is name-checked in one
crucial scene. Guns, grenades, flame throwers and other weapons dominate the
action, and one gets a thorough sense of the Rambo-fication of the franchise.

At
least two suburban houses explode in the film, and one (impressively lensed)
moment sees the Tall Man standing in the foreground while all hell breaks loose
behind him. He is literally surrounded by hellish fire.

It’s
not necessarily a bad tor unsatisfactory approach and Phantasm II is a wholly
entertaining rollercoaster of a film, even if it resolutely lacks the
intellectual and artistic heft of the 1979 original.

Where
Phantasm
II proves most intriguing is not in its crazy, often gruesome action,
but rather in its surprisingly effective (and prophetic?) vision of a
small-town America decimated by that Bringer of Death, the Tall Man.

I’ve
always liked Phantasm II second best in the franchise, judging it a solid,
well-made, involving sequel.

But
I do miss the absent piece of Phantasm’s creative legacy: the
acknowledgment and through-line that the Tall Man, his minions, and Michael’s
adventures are all some phantasm that reflects a very real fear in our kind;
the fear that death -- like taxes and horror movies sequels -- is utterly inescapable.

“Remember,
it was all in your imagination.”

Several
years after the death of his brother Jody, and his incarceration in a psychiatric
hospital, Michael (James Le Gros) is released and declared cured of his mental
illness. He promptly teams up with his old friend, Reggie (Reggie Bannister).

This
duo heads out on the road, in pursuit of the Tall Man, itching for a
fight. Michael can find The Tall Man
because he shares a mental link with another possible victim, a young woman in
Perigord, Oregon named Elizabeth (Paula Irvine).

Along
the way to reach and rescue Elizabeth, however, Reggie and Michael pick up a
stranger, Alchemy (Samantha Phillips), and must contend with booby traps left
by the Tall Man.

Finally,
the hunters reach Perigord, where Elizabeth has teamed with a priest, Father
Meyers (Kenneth Tigar), to put an end to the Tall Man’s reign of terror once
and for all.

“Let’s
go shopping.”

While
watching a sequel like Phantasm II, or for that matter,
James Cameron’s Aliens (1986), I often remember some of the punchy and very
smart dialogue from Wes Craven’s Scream 2 (1997). There, Randy Meeks
(Jamie Kennedy) explains how all horror genre sequels must ratchet up the body
count, feature more elaborate death sequences, and highlight what he terms “carnage candy.”

There’s
indeed much carnage candy in Phantasm II.

For
example, one unlucky minion of the Tall Man sees a silver sphere burrow inside
of him, hollow out his innards, then make its way through his neck, to his
mouth.

Another
extremely gory (and accomplished) scene finds the Tall Man’s face
disintegrating after being pumped full of hydrochloric acid.

Clearly,
the disgust quotient has been upped significantly since 1979, and now the
flying spheres or balls not only drain victims of their blood and gut them from
within, they lop off ears, shoot lasers (like a Predator shoulder cannon) and
the like.

This
“bigger is better” mentality informing sequel is part and parcel of the 1980s
genre cinema. Consider, again, Aliens. The film stresses action over suspense, and
pits the original hero, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) not against one
acid-for-blood xenomorphic monstrosity, but a veritable planet-ful of them.

Phantasm
II gets its
own dueling chainsaws scene (in which it is proved, for the record, that size
doesn’t matter…), and gives its audience full-on battle sequences with Reggie
and Michael overcoming dwarf minions by the dozen.

Reggie
takes out four of them with a customized shot-gun, with one pull of the
trigger.

One
early scene -- also perfect for the excesses of the eighties -- also sees
Reggie and Michael going “shopping,” buying items from a store and crafting their
signature weapons, including a fire extinguisher and the aforementioned shot
gun. They pay for all that they take,
and the focus is on making weaponry, so they can take the fight straight to the
Tall Man. As Reggie actually says in the film: “Come on, let’s go kick some ass!”

Phantasm
II possesses
two saving graces; ones that keep the film from being a brain-dead Rambo
in the Graveyard film.

The
first is the film’s sense of visual humor/style. As I noted in my introduction, Sam Raimi is
name-checked during one scene in an embalming room. A bag of ashes (Ash?) are
thrown in a bag labeled with the director’s name. This tribute is perfect, because Phantasm
II, much like an Evil Dead film, never stops moving, and
never remains still for along. Coscarelli’s camera plows through doors, one
after the other, in a very Deadite-ish gag that nonetheless works like
gangbusters.

Similarly,
Reggie’s run-in with a Graver (another Tall Man minion) is funny, tense, and
grotesque. Coscarelli demonstrates here
and throughout the film that he can shift between tones with aplomb, and keep
the whole enterprise moving at a crazy, gonzo clip.

More
impressive, however, is the subversive idea, just under the surface in Phantasm
II, that when Big Time Industry comes to a small town…the small town
dies. Much of the film involves Reggie
and Michael pursuing the Tall Man from American ghost town to American ghost
town. Michael observes that “small towns are like people. Some grow old
and die a natural death. Others are murdered.”

What
murders these small towns is the arrival of the Death Industry, under its CEO,
the Tall Man. He arrives, and strip-mines the towns for all their usable (on
his terms) resources. He takes over the local mortuary, and before you know it,
graveyards are being emptied at a rapid rate. His take-over (with his own
employees: dwarves and gravers, namely) literally kills the small towns in
short order. The denizens of the town die, and are made slaves.

Not
low-wage slaves, either. Just slaves.

For
many years (ten, actually) I lived in a beautiful southern small town; one with
beautiful old architecture and a downtown consisting of long-standing mom and
pop shops. In the span I lived there, this town was murdered, per Phantasm
II’s lingo, by the arrival on the main highway, not far away, of
shopping goliaths like Wal Mart, K-Mart and Target. The downtown shops emptied at an incredible
rate until the whole area -- so picturesque
and evocative of an earlier era in American history -- became a ghost town,
an image like something out Phantasm II.

So
perhaps Phantasm II is more than a perfect representative of its
gung-ho era -- the hyper-militarized, excessive, action packed 80s.

Perhaps
in some way the sequel was forecasting what the future of that world could one
day look like, in the 90s and beyond.Considering
the death, in so many places, of old fashioned, small-town America, it’s hard
not to view the enthusiastic line of dialogue in the film, “let’s go shopping!” as carrying an
ironic, double meaning.

I
also find Phantasm II’s undercutting of traditional religious belief to
be startling, especially given the traditional nature of the time period from
which the film hails. One of the most frightening notions ever put to the
horror film is voiced by the Tall Man here.

When
confronted with Father Meyers and his Christian faith, The Tall Man mocks
religion as fantasy, as delusion. “You think when you die, you go to Heaven?
You come to us!” He taunts.

It’s
a chilling declaration, and promise that the afterlife is not paradise, but
slavery. It’s downright chilling.

Finally, I appreciated Coscarelli's choice to tell Mike and Reggie's story (the 1979 original) through charcoal sketches in Elizabeth's notebook. I felt, personally, that this was an interesting and artistic way to resurrect images from the first Phantasm.

Phantasm
II cannot
match the brilliance and artistic depth of the original 1979 film, but in the
era of Freddy Krueger and Friday the 13th sequels,
it stakes out a claim for quality by balancing so well its scares and its laughs.
The sequel doesn’t open itself up very well to multiple readings, and the “dream”
or “rubber reality” concept is half-enunciated.

Here,
for example, Reggie doesn’t remember being attacked by the minions at Michael’s
house, even though Michael remembers it. This suggests the scene was a dream. But it is never explained how Michael parses this
experience in the real world. Was his
house actually destroyed by a gas leak?

It’s
awkward and confusing to viewers that Reggie only comes on board with the plan
to eliminate the Tall Man after his house also explodes, in the present. If the
movie had just treated the first scene as real, it wouldn’t need to create a
modern, artificial explanation for Reggie’s loyalty to the cause.

And
the film’s end, of course, is a slapdash re-assertion (or regurgitation) of the
original’s idea that Michael’s battle with the Tall Man is just a phantasm, not
reality. But it’s more difficult to make
that case here than it was in the original film because Michael seems to be sharing
a folie a deux with Elizabeth. Their delusion of a Supernatural (or alien?) Death
Merchant is mutual, thus making it unlikely to be just a young person’s fantasy
about defeating mortality.So
Phantasm
II is great to look at, watch, and experience…but not so great to think
about deeply. If you can accept the
sequel on those terms, it remains one of the most entertaining horror sequels of
the last half of the 1980s, and one featuring a few superb sequences. The Tall Man’s denunciation of our faith is
one example, and the view of small town America decimated by the Big Death
Industry is another.

About John

award-winning author of 27 books including Horror Films FAQ (2013), Horror Films of the 1990s (2011), Horror Films of the 1980s (2007), TV Year (2007), The Rock and Roll Film Encyclopedia (2007), Mercy in Her Eyes: The Films of Mira Nair (2006),, Best in Show: The Films of Christopher Guest and Company (2004), The Unseen Force: The Films of Sam Raimi (2004), An Askew View: The Films of Kevin Smith (2002), The Encyclopedia of Superheroes on Film & Television (2004), Exploring Space:1999 (1997), An Analytical Guide to TV's Battlestar Galactica (1998), Terror Television (2001), Space:1999 - The Forsaken (2003) and Horror Films of the 1970s (2002).

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